Deadly ICE shooting explained: Former DHS official and lawyer cite challenges

WASHINGTON (7News) — Two experts explained the deadly incident from Wednesday, where an ICE agent fatally shot a Minnesota woman in her car.

“Think about yourself when a car in front of you hits its brakes—the adrenaline in your body affects you. It’s the same with law enforcement officers on the street,” said former Department of Homeland Security official Joshua Ederheimer. He is also an Assistant Professor of Practice and Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at the University of Virginia’s Center for Public Safety and Justice.

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“You can’t de-escalate a car driving at you,” said Founder of the Blue Line Lawyer Institute Lance LaRusso. “A vehicle moving at…15miles an hour, which seems very slow, is moving 22 feet per second. There is no way to get out of the way of the car.”

Edenheimer said that making determinations from short videos does not work.

“Think about yourself in any situation, when a car in front of you hits its brakes, you know the adrenaline in your body, it affects you,” said Edenheimer. “It’s the same with law enforcement officers on the street. They’re in a tense situation and they don’t know what the person in the vehicle is thinking doing their level of threat. And there’s fast, overt action. We’re dealing with human beings here, including the law enforcement officers who are human beings.”

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Legally, LaRusso said law enforcement officers are going to have a hard time gathering evidence from the scene.

“There’s a lot of evidence to be gathered, not only from the street, but from even Ring cameras, cell phones,” said LaRusso. “There’s a concern that a lot of people, if they have video, may be reluctant to turn it over, especially if it benefits the officer.”

Politically, Edenheimer said the situation is tense:

Overlaying all of this are some serious politics. So you have the federal government sending in its law enforcement officers to a jurisdiction where the governor and the mayor have publicly said they don’t want them. So tension is already high, and that’s permeating this whole atmosphere. The way the DHS works is that they follow the law as it relates to use of force. So each agency in DHS, including ice, has its own set of use of force rules and guidelines, but they’re all connected to Supreme Court decisions, and those decisions really focus on the reasonableness of the use of force, and that’s how this is going to be evaluated.

WATCH THE FULL EDENHEIMER INTERVIEW

WATCH THE FULL LARUSSO INTERVIEW

Lawyer explains the deadly shooting (7News).